Producing Effective Tables and Figures/Some Examples

Some Examples (Using Table 1 To Help Decide Whether To Use Figures or Tables)

A) You want to show the effect of a new drug that you are testing that has been designed to help people get to sleep. You have two groups of people (one given a placebo, and one given the drug), and measure the average time it takes for people in each group to get to sleep after going to bed.

Displaying these results in a figure (e.g., in a bar chart) would work best because the most important thing to display is the pattern (did people taking the drug sleep longer than those that took the placebo?) rather than the specific data values.

B) You also want to show the ages of all the people (n=27) in the group given the drug, and whether they got to sleep faster than before they took part in the study.

Displaying these results in a table best provides the specific numerical data (ages of all 27 participants) and whether they got to sleep faster after taking the drug (Yes/No).